Pack your passports, we're heading to Brazil for today's episode of Momentos Musicales, and in so doing, we will add a couple more languages to our growing list, and also join the crowd in the ballroom of the SS Uruguay for what some recall to have been a dream team of 1940s Brazilian popular music. No, we won't hear "The Girl from Ipanema," but on the way to Rio, we might have passed through northeastern Brazil, able to hear the chant of a cattle ranger in the Sertanejo dialect of the Pernambuco state.
We arrive in Rio to see a crowd pressing forward to the gangplank of the SS Uruguay, where they are welcome aboard for a night of music. 50 years later, Paul Simon and the Oludum samba school would surely have been there to record their album, "The Rhythm of the Saints." Perhaps they learned some of their drum patterns from this 1940s school.
A Rio newspaper reported on the eighth of August, 1940 at 10 p.m. began the gathering of conjuntos escolas de Samba, members of Stokowski's youth orchestra, people who were going to sing and people who were going to listen. In this last group was the ship's captain himself, who soon took a place in a commodious armchair from where he observed the whole parade.
The room was filled with recording equipment, and one by one, soloists or groups gathered in front of the microphone to perform the best they had. Some were dreaming of hearing themselves later on a lacquered 78 rpm record. Donga, a legendary guitarist and composer of popular music presented Grupo do Pai Alufu to sing Macumba de Oxossi.
Short call and response phrases in Yoruba, a language brought to Brazil by the slave trade, were sung by a male soloist and a female chorus accompanied by powerful drumming. Samba is a musical genre and dance form first emerged in Brazil during the late 19th century and early 20th century, Samba music had evolved from earlier forms of Afro-Brazilian music such as lundu, batuque and maxixe.
On Friday August 9, 1940 with at least 40 tunes recorded (some say 100), Stokowski bid adieu to Rio de Janeiro and left for Sao Paulo. What did he give the musicians for their work? Only his enthusiastic compliments. For a while, hopes were high, that money that had been previously promised by Stokowski and Columbia Records would miraculously appear. Instead, to add a sad punctuation to this story, which some have called tragic, we know that most of the musicians died having never heard the recordings. Few were paid for them, and then, to add insult to injury, all but 17 tracks of music went missing and are still missing today. Que lastima. we're going out on a maxixe by Augustin Barrios. The maxixe originated in Rio in the last half of the 19th century, just one of the numerous dances of Brazil. There will be more as we round into the second half of Hispanic Heritage Month next week, until then, I'm James Baker, hoping you have a great weekend.
Antonio Carlos Jobim: The Girl from Ipanema
Budapest Clarinet Quintet
NAXOS 553527
Trad: Aboio (Sertanejo dialect of the Pernambuco State)
Camerata Cancion Antiqua
Sony 62882
Paul Simon: The Obvious Child (samba intro)
Oludum, Simon et al
Warner Bros. 7599260982
Trad: Macumba de Iansã
Ze Espinguela & Grupo do Pai Alufu
Columbia
Trad: Macumba de Oxossi (Yoruba language)
Ze Espinguela & Grupo do Pai Alufu
Columbia
Agustín Barrios-Mangoré: Maxixe
Berta Rojas
Dorian 93167
